Monday, April 23, 2007

Stupid articles like this one make me want to repeatedly bang my head against a wall. What is this fascination we have with naming generations anyway? It's a pretty vague thing to use for distinction, but once you put a name on it, then people seem to want to try and apply hard and fast rules to each generation.

More annoyingly, in this article, they decide to use two stupid names for the same generation.

Millennials — also known as Gen Y — are typically described as those born since the early 80s.

Millenials? That's ridiculous. It wouldn't sound nearly so bad if the author hadn't used it over and over again like it's a widely accepted term. And I know Generation Y is a pretty crappy name, being a lazy sequel type name derived from the slightly more creative Generation X, but that speaks more to the need to stop making up silly names for generations than a need to come up with a new one.

And how do people born in the 80's qualify as millenials? Also, born since the early 80's until when? Until now? That would put my son in this generation, and I'm pretty sure he's affected by none of this. It also puts grown men and women in the same generation with little kids, which is another reason these distinctions are stupid. If people were only born every twenty years or so, these generational distinctions would be significant and worth talking about.

The timeline in the sidebar starts with 1986 and the shuttle explosion. How did that affect anyone born in the early 80s in any way? What four year old pays attention to the news?

Aside from the above, the premise of the article is stupid. For what generation can you not put together a list of disasters that they lived through?

I can see the logic in whoever came up with the label for the Baby Boomers. After the war, with people coming home, and with a lot to be happy about, it made sense to point that out. But just because one generation was named doesn't mean we have to name the rest from now on. I guess it's just another annoying thing we can blame on the Baby Boomers.